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This is LBC with Nick Abbott, and this is Simon Marx, LBC's Washington correspondent.
Hello, Simon.
Evening Nick.
So quite the day.
It was sort of ironic that Trump did not attend the White House correspondence dinner before
because of the reception he thought he'd get.
And now this?
Yes, absolutely.
Ironic indeed.
He's now, of course, pressing for the dinner to take place to be rescheduled.
He says within the next month, within the next 30 days, I have to tell you that the president
has given an interview tonight to 60 minutes, the flagship current affairs program on CBS,
a network that is generally now increasingly friendly to him, but he has engaged in a very
difficult exchange on 60 minutes with Nora O'Donnell, the former anchor of the CBS evening
news.
She has read to him a portion of the alleged gunman's 1000-word manifesto that was sent again
reportedly by the suspect to members of his own family minutes before the attempt to breach
security at the Hilton Hotel 24 hours ago.
That was all taking place, of course, on the ground floor of the Hilton Hotel.
That's where the security was set up.
The president was enjoying his salad course along with 2,000 invited guests in the basement
ballroom.
The gunman, of course, was tackled on the first floor, never got close to the basement
ballroom.
But take a listen to this simply astonishing exchange between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News
and President Donald Trump on 60 minutes tonight.
The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President.
He appears to reference a motive in it.
He writes this quote, administration officials, they are targets.
And he also wrote this, I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile rapist and traitor to
coat my hands with his crimes.
What's your reaction to that?
Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would, because you're your
horrible people.
Horrible people.
Yeah, he did write that.
I'm not a rapist.
I didn't rape anybody.
Oh, you think he was referring to you?
Excuse me.
I'm not a pedophile.
You read that crap from some sick person.
I got associated with all the stuff that has nothing to do with me.
I was totally exonerated.
Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let's
say, Epstein or other things.
But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably, I read the
manifesto.
You know, it's a sick person.
But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that because I'm not any of those things.
Staggering exchange there on 60 minutes tonight between Nora O'Donnell of CBS News and President
Trump in which he denies the claims made in the manifesto by this alleged suspect.
The suspect doesn't name him in the manifesto.
That's why you heard Nora O'Donnell there saying to him, oh, you think he's referring
to you?
And then the president denies that he is a rapist, has ever been a pedophile, insists
once again that it was, as he puts it in that exchange, friends of Nora O'Donnell by
which he means the people and the Democratic Party, prominent Democrats, people on the left
that were associated with Jeffrey Epstein, not him.
And that exchange, I think, is going to be dominating headlines here tomorrow morning.
It literally aired within the last few minutes on CBS.
On CNN, meanwhile, they had the Democrat Jamie Raskin in for an interview and the host
on CNN blamed Jamie Raskin for previously saying that Trump is bad for the country for
this attack.
Utterly extraordinary and utterly extraordinary question posed to Congressman Jamie Raskin
Democrat from Maryland by Dana Bash of CNN asking him, in essence, whether the Democrats
are now going to cool it with their attacks on President Donald Trump and intimating through
the question that Democrats in some sense may have been responsible for this attempt to
breach security at the Hilton Hotel last night.
I mean, again, look, this entire weekend and I don't take this view because Donald
Trump is president.
I have taken this view for over 20 years in this city.
This White House correspondence dinner every year is just the most appalling example of
media organizations choosing to cozy up casually and establish friendly relationships with the
people in power that they cover.
And it's one of the reasons why I never attend any of these dinners.
I stopped attending these dinners years ago because I just felt that this was an
increasingly uncomfortable place to be.
We should not as reporters be casually socializing with the newsmakers that we cover on a daily
basis.
But we've now got to a stage where the news media pinned down as they were in the ballroom
briefly last night and let's be clear it was brief because the government didn't get
anywhere near the ballroom itself.
He didn't even get down to the basement level of the hotel.
Huge questions as we've been talking about earlier in the day on LBC about the nature
of the security operation that was put into place at that hotel last night.
There's going to be a big investigation into that.
But now you have the news media that was present in the room for that dinner and President
Trump and his top officials kind of fused together by the traumatic experience that they
went through last night.
And the result of that was the extraordinary moment today on CNN where a Democrat member
of Congress who himself was at the dinner last night and went back into the room saying
the show must go on just as President Trump had been doing before, of course, they canceled
it on the advice of law enforcement is basically challenged by CNN and asked whether he's going
to continue vocally opposing the actions of the Trump administration because in some sense
the anchor woman was suggesting that perhaps the Democrats had fueled all of this, which
just takes the relationship between the media and the politicians they cover to an entirely
new low, which is another reason why no self-respecting reporter should be going to these events.
Yes, I mean, apart from anything else, it's the price of the ticket to sit there and eat,
isn't it?
I mean, they presumably are not paying for themselves in large numbers, I would imagine,
they are being paid for by friendly corporations to the president.
Well, I think it's $300 a ticket now and increasingly, of course, the reporter's ticket
price is covered by the networks that they work for.
But what's happened to this dinner, it's really important to understand this because
it's been around since the 1920s, but this is not the event that it was when I first
moved here over 30 years ago.
There are a handful of members of the permanent Washington elite who about 20 years ago decided
that the character and tenor of this dinner needed to change and that it needed to become
the East Coast's answer to the Oscars.
So it became this celebrity-studied weekend-long affair that completely polluted what had been
a fairly straightforward single-night event where the reporters got into the room with
the president and they all roasted each other.
Yes.
And now it's this weekend of excess that begins with lunch parties on the Saturday, stretches
out into after parties after the dinner, then the Sunday is filled with parties as well,
networks falling over themselves to get celebrities and prominent figures from whichever administration
is in power to sit at their respective tables, the same networks that are trimming their
news budgets, firing reporters, cutting back their international news operations.
It's just an appalling event and unfortunately last night, one that came under attack.
Simon, always good to talk to you.
Thanks so much for that.
Simon Marx, LBC's Washington correspondent.

Simon Marks Reporting

Simon Marks Reporting

Simon Marks Reporting
